11.11-The Three Days of Red

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Episode 11.11, The Three Days of Red

On July 8th, 2247, Company Time, Martian activist and now former D-Class technician Alexandra Clare was sleeping in a housing allotment in Expansion 3, subsection 14.

I say former D-Class technician because Claire had been annulled back in December of 2246.

Ever since then, she had been living under the radar with the help of her comrades in the Society of Martians.

When security services ramped up their efforts to round up the remaining annulled, after new director of Mars Division Eva Zhang gave them a real incentive to do so, Claire had been among those who chose to remove her skin chip completely.

This marked her for life, but she didn't care.

Claire was determined to avoid detection and deportation at all costs.

But while she slept in a Society of Martians safehouse with 12 other Anoled, security services burst through the door.

Before Claire or anyone else could react, they were subdued and arrested.

Claire was now in a very tight spot because skin chip removal, all on its own, was grounds for immediate deportation.

After being arrested, Claire and the others were tossed into Stockade 7.

Now Stockade 7 was a standard-issue stockade.

It was meant to temporarily house employees accused of certain violations of the corporate code before judgment was rendered.

Typically, the violations were of the more destructive sort, like physical assaults or property damage.

Some prisoners would be given punishment and released.

Others would find the stockade their last stop before deportation deportation to Saturn.

There were 50 single-occupancy cells in Stockade 7, and in the normal course of life on Mars the cell block was rarely filled to capacity.

But when the ennulment crisis got going, the stockades really started filling up, even more so since security services actually started doing their jobs around February 2247.

So it used to be that a standard shift of personnel was only about 10 or 12 guards, and they often didn't have much to do.

But when the ennulments started, the cells really started filling up, and so guard shifts were doubled to somewhere around 20.

But even this would not be enough.

By the time Claire was arrested in July, Stockade 7 was far beyond max capacity.

They were being packed five to a cell to await deportation.

And these are single-occupancy cells.

So what we've got here is about 250 prisoners living in stifling conditions, being monitored at any given time by just 20 guards.

Through the first half of 2247, B-class defense advocates like Marcus Leopold and Ivana Darby continued to fight every annulment and deportation order they could.

They only had limited success, but if nothing else, it was worth delaying final processing as much as possible, because they might wake up one morning and find that the fever had finally broken and all the annulments reversed.

After all, there had already been some reinstatements for people in the A and B classes.

There was reason to hope such reinstatements would filter down to the lower classes.

So it was by sheer coincidence that when Alexandra Clare was arrested she wound up in the client portfolio of Marcus Leopold himself.

So Clare and Leopold met formally for the first time on July 15, 2247, when he visited Stockade 7 for a preliminary interview.

Neither of them knew it, of course, but this marked the beginning of a long and extremely complicated relationship.

But at the moment, it was not particularly complicated.

The removal of the skin chip bypassed a bunch of possible defenses and put her right at the top of the deportation list.

Leopold promised to do what he could, but there was very little he could do.

Claire did not doubt Leopold's commitment either to her or to the other prisoners.

But as she wrote in her memoir, One Red Life, I hadn't precisely given up hope, but those days in Stockade 7 were some of the worst of my life.

I had fought hard to resist the bastards, watched my friends die, been forced to live in the shadows.

Now it all seemed to have been for nothing.

I was about to be deported from the only home I had ever known.

I had removed my skin ship and now had to live with the crushing consequences of that choice.

I was doomed.

I wish I could say in response I bravely planned the uprising in Stockade 7, but the truth is, it was all an accident.

It just happened.

Hell, when the fighting started, I was just sitting in my cell, literally, with my head in my hands.

To Claire's point, a lot of myths have built up around the insurrection in Stockade 7.

That it was a planned society of Martians operation, that Claire herself was the mastermind, that it was meant to be the start of the revolution.

None of that is true.

The reality is that it all started with an unexpected fight over the state of the latrines.

Seriously.

As I said, Stockade 7 was badly overcrowded, and the latrine in each cell was meant for only one person.

For months now, the latrines had been overburdened by too many prisoners, and they repeatedly malfunctioned.

Claire had been living in in these intolerably cramped conditions for about two weeks when, on July 21, 2247, the latrines in five of the cells malfunctioned simultaneously and

reverse discharged.

This, as you can imagine, was pretty gross, and the prisoners had to be removed from their cells so they could be cleaned.

This necessitated bringing the entire complement of on-duty guards into the cell block to make sure none of the prisoners tried anything while they were out of their cells.

But when the cells were done being hosed out, the commander of the watch ordered the prisoners back inside.

But the prisoners balked.

No maintenance crew had been called to even look at the malfunctioning latrines.

What was to stop this from happening again?

The commander of the watch didn't care.

He just wanted the prisoners back in their cells.

The prisoners refused to move.

The commander ordered the guards to present batons and neutron guns.

And that's when it started.

Right there, right then, is when the Martian Revolution began.

As the guards advanced to start pushing the prisoners back in their cells, the infuriated prisoners snapped and fought back.

The guards had not expected this, and were shocked when the prisoners surged forward instead of falling back.

Batons swung and neutron guns blasted, but in the sudden rush they were wild and inaccurate.

In the resulting melee, the attacking prisoners overwhelmed the guards, disarmed them, and turned their weapons against them.

In the span of like 60 seconds, most of the guards, including the watch commander, commander, lay unconscious on the floor or cowering with their hands up, neutron guns pointed at their heads.

The prisoners left standing stripped the watch commander's key pass and used it to start opening the rest of the cells.

Now the guards who had remained in the monitor station during all this made a crucial mistake.

When the fighting broke out, they grabbed weapons and rushed into the cell block to reinforce the other guards rather than implement an emergency lockdown.

This mistake meant that when these last remaining guards rushed through the door, they ran right into a wall of prisoners, a bunch of them wielding batons and neutron guns.

The prisoners attacked these paltry reinforcements and forced them right back out through the open door separating the cell block from the monitor station.

Whoops.

So, less than five minutes after the fighting started, the prisoners of Stockade 7 had overrun Stockade 7.

All the prisoners were released from their cells.

The defeated, disarmed, and or unconscious guards were themselves herded into cells and locked up.

It's easy to see why people always assumed it was a pre-planned coordinated uprising, but mostly the insurrection in Stockade 7 was driven by outrage, anger, and adrenaline.

Up in the Prime Dome, alarms started going off at the headquarters of the security services.

The neutron gun discharged as pinged alerts, and they called down to see what was happening.

These hails went unanswered.

This was alarming, so they initiated emergency procedures.

There were two ways in and out of Stockade 7.

Laterally, through the front door, which opened to a single main corridor, which linked to 5-Way 13 of Expansion 3.

The other was vertically, up through a lift shaft that connected to a processing facility on the sea level that itself connected to the surface where transport shuttles would carry deportees off the planet.

The doors accessing both were immediately shut and locked, with security service reinforcements deployed to both sites.

That way, whatever was happening in Stockade 7 would stay in Stockade 7.

These orders were issued less than 10 minutes after the initial fighting began.

Inside the stockade, there were animated discussions among the now former prisoners about what to do next.

At least one of them had the presence of mind to realize that if the authorities knew what was happening, they were probably locked in here with no obvious way out.

Their only hope, really, was to get a message out to alert their fellow Martians of their plight and position.

And also, pray the authorities didn't just decide to vent and void the whole stockade.

A few paranoid souls worried they might flood the air with some kind of knockout gas to incapacitate them, but they were assured that for all our technological advances, humans had never gotten that one quite right, this despite quite a bit of testing that either had a limited effect or killed the subjects.

So relax.

Sure, we might all die down here and that's out of our control, but we're not going to get knocked out.

like you might have seen in your screen vids.

They did, however, still have the watch commander's key pass, and they used that to access the communications network.

From there, one of the prisoners who had experience with such networks, a guy named Barnes Culvert, hacked his way out to the black channels, and they pulsed out the message repeatedly, We are trapped in Stockade 7 of Expansion 3.

We have liberated ourselves but are under siege.

Send help.

Send help now.

This message was pulsed out for about five minutes before the hack was discovered up at Security Services headquarters and patched, but it was enough.

So this strange message starts appearing out of the blue on the black channels.

It was picked up by people in the Society of Martians who passed it up the line curious to find out if it was real or fake.

These requests wound their way up to Mabel Dorr, who had no idea if it was real or fake.

So in her capacity as a member of the Martian Advisory Council, she messaged Eva Zhang's office to ask for clarification.

According to Cliffs of Glass, the biography of Eva Zhang, Zhang herself did not yet know what was happening, because she had not yet been alerted by her own head of security.

This was a guy called Boris Haptow, who had been on the job since Werner fired his predecessor right after Bloody Sunday.

So it was Dorr's communique that made Zhao ask Haptow, what's happening in Stockade 7?

He replied, it's all under control.

There's nothing to worry about.

So Zhang wrote back to Dorr, there is no incident at Stockade 7.

It is under control.

Which was phrased in just such such a way as to make it blindingly obvious there was an incident at Stockade 7, which Dorr communicated back down the Society of Martians network, saying, yes, something is going on.

So down in Expansion 3, some D-Class members of the Society of Martians were told to go find out what was happening, try to lay eyes on Stockade 7.

But of course, when they got to 5W13, they found the corridor that would have taken them to the stockade blocked and under heavy armed guard, which they reported back up the line.

Basically, we don't know what's going on, but something's going on.

We've got a live one here.

Meanwhile, Zhang demanded a briefing from Boris Haftow, who then had to admit, yeah, we've reviewed the camera footage and it appears some prisoners have broken out of their cells in Stockade 7.

Zhang asked how many prisoners and he had to say, all of them.

But he assured her that the situation was well in hand.

Both entry and exit points were locked down and under heavy guard.

There was no way out.

He personally recommended venting and voiding the entire stockade to neutralize the problem.

Zhang asked if there were any security personnel left alive in there, and Haptow says, yes, by the look of the video, there's about 20 of them in there.

Maybe more, maybe less.

Zhang said, I'm not voiding the stockade and killing them all.

I don't need that on my head.

Instead, she demanded to open a communications channel to whoever was currently in charge of Stockade 7 because it clearly wasn't the security services.

Haptow complied.

So back down in Stockade 7 comes a voice through the communications system, saying, you are speaking directly to Mars Division Director Eva Zhang.

There is no reason for this to end in bloodshed and death.

What are your demands?

In her memoir, Claire says, When she asked what our demands were, we looked at each other in confused silence.

We didn't have any demands.

We hadn't planned on taking over the stockade.

So Claire herself and a few of the other prisoners who were members of the Society of Martians quickly worked up a simple list based on the demands they had been making all along.

Reinstate all of the annulled.

No more deportations.

And also, while you're at it, pardons for everyone here in Stockade 7.

Zhang, of course, refused these demands and said, I can't negotiate with a neutron gun pointed at my head.

I need you to surrender, and then we'll talk.

The prisoners refused and restated their demands.

Zhang threatened to void the stockade.

But the insurrectionary prisoner said, who cares?

You're just going to put us on a ship to Saturn anyway, so what's the difference between death now and death later?

But remember, we've got your people down here, and they don't want to die, and you don't want to kill them.

Meanwhile, the Society of Martians Networks put out a call for everyone to gather as many people as they could and head to 5way 13.

Go there now to bear witness to what might be happening in Stockade 7.

Bring pressure to bear any way you can.

Your unjustly imprisoned comrades are trapped in there and we have to help them.

It took a beat for the security service personnel guarding the door to the stockade to notice that the 5-Way behind them was filling up faster than was, strictly speaking, normal.

So they communicated up their chain of command to say, this place is starting to get crowded.

What should we do?

The response came back, we're on it.

We'll start blocking access to 5-Way 13 by closing and locking doors.

But of course, they are now dealing with a population of Martians who had been doing no doors for years now.

They knew how to deactivate them from the network and jam them open.

So headquarters told the security services on the ground, okay, it's done.

The doors are now shut.

We'll send you more reinforcements to deal with crowd control.

And the response came back, that's great, sir, except uh, the doors aren't shut, and people are still streaming in.

When Haptau asked Zhang if she wanted to order security services to clear the five-way, Zhang said, no, we do not need another massacre like Bloody Sunrise.

I won't have it, and it'll just make everything worse.

And she was maybe right.

The whole incident was spiraling out of anyone's control, and even in an alternate timeline where she orders the crackdown, graphically injures, and kills people while also avoiding Stockade 7, well, how does that not just lead to the kind of explosion they were trying to avoid?

But Zhang did order additional security to start manning the other corridors into the five-way in an attempt to keep more people from showing up.

So now we have these like concentric lines of hostility.

At the center, we have the insurrectionary prisoners in the stockade.

Then beyond them, we have the first line of security services guarding the 5way13 corridor so that no one could get in or out.

Beyond them, we have the Martians who are gathered in 5way 13.

Beyond them, we have the security services who are manning the other corridors into 5way 13 to prevent people from entering.

And then beyond them, we finally have more Martians who are gathering.

So it's a lot of people, a lot of of tension, and a lot of weapons.

With all of this unfolding, Mabel Dorr demanded Eva Zhang convene the Martian Advisory Council to help work out a solution before things really got out of hand.

Zhang finally agreed about eight hours into the standoff.

And when they met, Zhang laid out the prisoner's demands, reverse the annulments, and end deportations.

Most of the members of the MAC said, yeah, okay, that sounds great.

That's what we've been telling you to do for months now.

Zhang said, well, I can't do it under this kind of threat.

And they said, well, if you had done it before, we wouldn't be in this mess.

So maybe just do it.

Worry more about ending the growing crisis and less about the optics.

Zhang said thanks but no thanks and dismissed them.

But the MAC leaders decided to remain in their own permanent session until the crisis was resolved.

So they reconvened at the home of Mabel Dorr in the Prime Dome.

After 12 hours, Zhang finally decided decided to call Earth and lay out the situation.

After a few delays, she was finally patched through to Timothy Warner, who had lost none of his blithe myopia since departing Mars.

He said that he knew this sort of thing would happen, that the Martian Advisory Council was clearly in league with the insurrectionary prisoners, that he never should have been talked into devolving control of Mars back to Mars Division.

and that he was terminally disappointed in Zhang's failures.

She said, okay, well what do you want me to do about it?

And he said, I want you to handle it.

Don't give an inch.

Restore order.

Immediately.

Werner out.

Shortly after this call, company time ticked past midnight, and July 21st became July 22nd.

And the second day of red began.

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The second day of red really got going at 5 a.m.

Company time on July 22, 2247.

Because that is when an anonymous message got pushed out onto the networks and onto everyone's screens.

Fellow Martians at Red, by now you've heard of the standoff at Stockade 7.

We need your help.

Brave and noble Martians, unjustly sentenced to deportation, have refused to be banished from their homes.

We must support them.

We must reinstate the annuled.

We must end deportations.

Until these demands are met, and our fellow Martians in Stockade 7 are liberated, do not go to your job site.

Do not go to work.

It is time to say the word that we are forbidden to say.

We say, strike.

It's still very murky who wrote and blasted this message out.

All we really know for sure is that it did not come from the top of the Society of Martians.

Every account I've read says that they were trying to de-escalate the situation.

Mabel Dorr herself woke up to this message on the morning of July 22nd, furious that somebody was trying to blow up this crisis beyond anyone's ability to control it.

Now they all literally wanted the same thing.

Dorr herself had been upfront and vocal about reversing annulments and ending deportations all year.

But she did not believe that embarking on a strike, the dirtiest word in the corporate codebook, was what this moment called for.

Now history has a funny way of working out.

Sometimes it seems like something is inevitable, and then it doesn't happen.

Sometimes something seems impossible, right up until the moment it happens.

Some sparks start a fire.

Others fizzle out and die.

But for whatever combination of reasons, the call for the Martians to go on strike on the morning of July 22nd caught fire.

Martians in all three colony cities looked around at each other and said, you know what?

Frack it.

Some critical mass of grievances was finally unlocked.

They were so unbelievably sick of all the bullshit that they just didn't care about the consequences of not going to work.

Now, of course, not everyone went on strike that morning, probably not even a majority of the population.

But more than enough stayed home to grind work on Mars to a halt.

Not nearly enough people were showing up to job sites to get any real work done.

So, when the strike began, where did all of those people go if they weren't going to work?

Well, on Olympus, they were drawn out of a mixture of excitement and curiosity towards Expansion 3 Stockade 7.

That's where the action was.

Now, they couldn't really get close to Stockade 7 anymore.

Security services had been busy setting up cordons and checkpoints.

But wherever people hit one of those cordons or checkpoints, they did not turn around and go home.

They stayed and milled around, and something like a raucous party atmosphere took hold.

People thrilled in ditching work and being a part of the action, even if being part of the action was just milling around at an impromptu party.

Back at Fiveway 13, meanwhile, things were getting a bit more fraught.

The Fiveway had been filled near capacity in the hours after the standoff at Stockade 7 began, and all of those people remained in place.

As the hours kept ticking by, everyone got a little more hungry, a little more thirsty, and a little more testy.

And that was true on both sides.

Neither the security services guarding the corridor into Stockade VII, nor the people surrounding them, had come prepared for a prolonged siege.

And the five-way, of course, had commissaries and drink holes and food bars, but the C-Class supervisors in charge of them locked them down in the hopes of driving away the crowd.

But it didn't drive them away.

It just made them all considerably more irritable.

So as it turns out, the standoff at Stockade 7 was not resolved by one side or the other backing down.

It was resolved by what's about to happen in Fiveway 13.

And the strike continued all day.

No amount of announcements or threats or paydocks or any other punishment induced people to go back to work.

Zhang stayed holed up in the Prime Dome with her staff.

She took a further meeting with the Martian Advisory Council, who said they were working to keep everyone and everything peaceful, which it mostly was, but it sure would be nice if you gave in to the demands now.

Boris Haptow leaned on her to crack down and drive these people out.

But Zhang had real fear that if she did anything to move on Stockade 7 or try to clear up the crowds, that the situation would explode.

She need not have worried about that, though, because it exploded all on its own.

At 7 p.m.

Company time on July 22nd, the Martians occupying Fiveway 13 started chanting for all the commissaries and drink holes and food bars to be opened up to them.

Specifically, they were chanting, Open up, open up.

This brought the crowd to life after a few hours of inactivity.

Then they started moving and jostling around.

Those nearest the line of the security services blocking the corridor to Stockade 7 turned their ire on those security personnel, hurling insults at them, and by some accounts, objects.

And yes, you know what's coming next.

Of course you do.

One of the security service personnel, we will never know who and we will never know why, fired a shot.

It hit one of the Martians at point-blank range, dropping him to the ground.

People screamed in shock and horror, and then screamed some more, because after that first shot went off, other security service personnel started firing.

There would be no peaceful resolution to the standoff at Stockade 7.

But neither would it become a massacre like Bloody Sunrise.

It would would instead become a full-blown riot.

In those chaotic moments after the first shots went off, part of the crowd, of course, broke for the exits, but the movement of the crowd sent a wave of people, not really of their own volition, crashing into the security service line guarding the corridor to Stockade 7.

Neutron gun blasts dropped careening Martians left and right, but so many surged forward all at once that the security line was overwhelmed.

Just as had happened inside Stockade 7 the day before, Martians now emerged from the fray holding weapons they'd ripped away from the security personnel.

Neutron guns in hand, they turned a potential massacre into a firefight.

Shots blasted in both directions and bodies piled up, either stunned or killed.

But every time a Martian went down, another Martian picked up their weapon and kept firing.

Every time a member of the security services went down, they just went down.

Inside the stockade, they could hear the commotion down the corridor and braced for some kind kind of assault.

Then they heard a cacophony of voices advancing down the corridor towards the door to the stockade.

Alexandra Clare says they all hunkered down prepared for a last stand.

But when the door finally opened, they saw not a phalanx of armed and armored security personnel, but exhilarated Martians, not a little bit crazed, rushing towards them saying, We've come to free you, you're free.

We couldn't believe it, Clare writes in One Red Life.

We had all been staring certain death in the face since the moment we were arrested, and we had been staring imminent death in the face for the last 36 hours or so.

Suddenly, for the first time, it felt like there was the possibility of life.

The fighting that had consumed the security service line in 5W13 now repeated in all the adjacent corridors.

That central explosion of riotous energy sent a mass of people rushing through the corridors in every direction.

The security lines that were manning the corridors into 5W13 were overwhelmed by an onslaught of people madly rushing to get out of 5W13.

Those security service units blasted their neutron guns and swung their batons, but were overwhelmed as Martians on both sides of their positions joined the fray.

More bodies piled up, but the Martians successfully attacked, disarmed, and finished off the doomed security service units.

Up in the Prime Dome, Ava Zhang cursed her luck and ordered a colony-wide lockdown.

That's it, no more, full quarantine protocols.

This shut and locked doors throughout the colony.

For about 10 minutes.

Because the Society of Martians had in their ranks plenty of skilled hackers who knew the systems of Mars division inside and out.

And they knew that the new protocols had introduced several massively exploitable vulnerabilities that they had never taken advantage of because to do so would have just been too drastic a step.

But as soon as the quarantine order hit, some daring soul out there decided this was as good a time as any to just go for it.

Several Martins later claimed credit and would argue with each other for years about who had done it.

But in less than ten minutes after the quarantine protocol took effect, it suddenly lifted, because across Mars systems ceased recognizing commands from the executive mainframe.

This meant that not only was the quarantine protocol canceled, but the authorities in the Prime Dome suddenly and shockingly lost their ability to control the machinery of Olympus.

So down in the Warrens, the Martians were free to unleash years of frustration and anger.

As waves of riotous energies spread, they now faced little friction.

Overwhelmed security services were surrounded, beaten and disarmed.

Some were able to pull back to their stations, but they came under attack from Martians now wielding weapons of their own.

Many understaffed stations were overrun, arms lockers opened, with more neutron guns, batons, and other weapons distributed.

Now there were even more armed Martians roaming around.

Some stations simply surrendered without a fight, and in a few memorable cases, security personnel declared themselves for the Martians to great cheering and applause.

Almost by an act of unconscious group will, the riotous Martians in the Warrens pretty quickly stopped spreading out, and started going up.

They started going up as if they were pulled by some kind of magnet.

Because in addition to all the other slogans being yelled and chanted, to the prime dome began to ring loudly and clearly.

And so up, up, up they went, driven by some inexorable collective will.

They commandeered lift shafts for personnel, lift shafts for equipment, lift shafts for maintenance.

Anything that would take anyone up, they packed full of people and sent them as high as they could go.

Now there was no lift shaft that went directly from the Warrens to the Prime Dome.

This was on purpose, and specifically meant to prevent such direct access from the depths of the colony to the highest levels.

But they could get pretty high, and wherever they got out, the lifts were sent back down for more people.

Up in the Prime Dome, Boris Haptow tried to coordinate a response, but the executive mainframe was unable to control the lifts and doors anymore.

And the higher in the habitat levels you ascended, the fewer security personnel there were.

Security personnel was there to keep the Rabo and the Warrens in line, not the genteel executives of the upper levels.

Soon enough, armed Martians from the Warrens were rising up and spreading out everywhere across the B levels and the A levels, basically unchecked.

Realizing security services would not be able to hold any of this back, Haptow sent out an order for all of his personnel, wherever they were, if they could, to retreat up to the Prime Dome itself.

This order went out at about 1 a.m.

Company Time, on what was now July 23, 2247,

the third day of Red.

Alexandra Clare and her liberated comrades from Stockade 7, meanwhile, had marched out with neutron guns in hand.

Some, like Clare, were active in the Society of Martians, but most of them were just ordinary Martians.

They weren't rebels or resistance fighters.

They had simply been annulled.

But now they were together, and they were an armed squad.

After surveying the carnage in Fiveway 13 they regrouped and like everyone else were drawn up by the pull of the Prime Dome.

She and her comrades commandeered a maintenance lift that took them up to the A levels, where they got out and went hunting for a way up to the Prime Dome.

Mostly, they met no resistance at all.

Now none of them had seen the A levels before.

Claire and her comrades marveled at at the passageways covered in beautiful pixel mosaics that pleasantly shifted color and shape.

They passed through a large atrium filled with exotic plants, or at least they seemed exotic, because none of them had ever seen a live plant before, only digital or fabricated imitations.

As all hell broke loose throughout Olympus, B-class radicals were about to be swept upward themselves.

People like Marcus Leopold, Ivana Darby, and Jaolin gathered at the Mons Cafe with a a who's who of future revolutionary leaders, including Maggie Spinoza, Antoine Demanche, Cora Lowe, Malik Becure, and Kenji Grew.

They agreed that this could be it.

This could be Mars finally taking control of its own destiny.

The Earthlings had played too many hands in a row too poorly to be allowed to win.

If the masses from the Warrens swept up into the Prime Dome, they could overthrow Mars division and take control of the colony.

If that happened, the Martians deserved something that represented everyone's voice and everyone's interests, something more than just the elite Martian Advisory Council.

A free Mars would need an assembly representing all Martians.

And who better to organize and lead that assembly, but us.

While they met in the Mons Cafe, Martians from the Warrens started appearing in the B-class corridors looking for access to the Prime Dome.

The Mons Cafe group joined one of these roving bands and directed them towards the lifts that would take them all the way to the top.

Then, many of them fanned out to find more of these bands wherever they were and direct them on how to keep going up, up, up,

all the way to the top.

Up in the Prime Dome, Boris Haptow organized what forces he could muster and quickly determined he did not have nearly enough personnel to cover every access line into the Prime Dome.

There were simply too many maintenance tubes and equipment lifts and stairwells.

The level that divided the surface from the underground was simply too permeable.

But they could pull back to Mars Division headquarters and almost certainly barricade themselves inside and hold out.

Hold out for what?

Who knows?

But hold out.

By now, Martians were pouring up into the prime dome, most of them seeing what they had never seen in their entire lives.

The sky.

This vast expanse of reddish-pink that gave some of them vertigo upon laying eyes on it.

There were now among their number A and B class members of the Society of Martians, who pointed them towards headquarters, which were soon surrounded on all sides by a teeming and ever-growing mass of Martians.

At first, a few tried to storm headquarters, but they were pretty well blasted to hell by Haptau security personnel.

Mabel Dorr and the other members of the Martian Advisory Council emerged from her home, where they had been meeting in continuous session, and joined the throng in front of Mars Division headquarters.

Martians who did not converge on headquarters meanwhile just sort of had their run of the streets and buildings of the Prime Dome, seeing the relative splendor and luxury the upper levels had enjoyed, living lives that people down in the Warrens could not even conceive of.

By 9 o'clock in the morning company time on July 23rd, Ava Zhang and the other S-Class executives of Mars Division now found themselves in the position the insurrectionary prisoners had been in the day before down in Stockade 7, surrounded on all sides with no way in or out.

Or so it seemed.

Mabel Dore and the other MAC leaders attempted to negotiate a final peaceful settlement and get Zhang to announce that the annulments were reversed and the deportations would stop.

They said, you have to do this, if for no other reason than to save your own skin.

And finally, finally, finally, Zhang saw the light.

Over Boris Haptow's strenuous objections, Zhang messaged that she was willing to meet the Martian demands.

So Mabel Dore then got out in front of the assembled Martians to announce that they had won.

Their demands were being met.

Now she couldn't be heard very well over the din of the crowd, and so this message had to be passed back to ripples of cheering that followed the news as it was relayed backward from person to person.

But there is one final act left to play out.

Martians who had gone around the back and the side of the building kept probing for ways in.

Haptow deployed security personnel to upper-story windows to fire down at anyone who got too close, but there were too many people coming at the building simultaneously.

And eventually, a group that had brought up explosive devices from an excavation storehouse deep in the Warrens avoided the fire coming from above, planted their explosives against a wall, and then darted back out.

So right as the crowd in front of headquarters was cheering their victory, A huge explosion went off, blasting a hole in the side of the building.

As soon as the shock and dust cleared, Martians rushed forward through the giant hole this explosion had opened.

Pretty soon, those massed in front of the headquarters heard shots fired inside, as those coming in through the gaping hole met the security services inside, who thought they had set up a pretty impregnable position.

Other Martians who came in through the blasted hole, meanwhile, raced around to other doors to let their comrades in through the back or the side, opening really anything that could be opened.

This is the moment when Alexandra Claire and her comrades from Stockade 7 entered the fray.

They had wound up behind headquarters after finally making their way into the prime dome, and had lately been taking shots at security personnel up in the windows with negligible effect.

But then the bomb went off, the tide shifted, and the next thing they knew, back doors were being thrown open, so Claire and everyone else rushed inside.

Haptow and his remaining security forces were now under intense pressure from multiple sides.

Now I think that Boris Haptow himself would have fought to the last man and never given up, but it was no longer his call.

Attacked from multiple sides and a seemingly endless stream of Martians pouring into the building, security services personnel started throwing down their weapons and throwing up their hands.

It was, they concluded, the only way they were getting out of this alive.

So the front door of the headquarters was now thrown open to the still enormous crowd out in front, who cheered wildly and jostled forward to get into the building themselves.

Everything was now total chaos.

The Martians overran everything.

Inside this chaotic mass of people, there was a group of 27 Martians who made their way into the building as a unit.

And unlike practically everyone else, they seemed to know exactly what they were doing and where they were going.

In this group was Marcus Leopold, Ivana Darby, Zhao Lin, Maggie Spinoza, Antoine Dumange, Cora Lowe, Malik Becure, and Kenji Grew.

They pushed their way through the jubilant throngs of Martians and headed straight for the commissary.

The commissary that was the site of Jose de Petrov's failure to liberate Mars and where they planned to see his dream through to the end.

They entered the commissary along with other Martians who had no idea what was going on.

When they were all inside, Ivana Darby stood up on a table and bellowed, We, the people of Mars, call for the creation of a Martian assembly.

All in favor?

And those who had come to do just that shouted, Yes, yes, yes.

And then Darby yelled out, The Martian Assembly is hereby formed and is now in session.

The first order of business is independence.

All those in favor say aye, and the twenty-seven Martians who had come to do just that all shouted, Aye.

And that is where we will leave things today.

The three days of red had begun with a fight over malfunctioning latrines and ended with a massive uprising.

Literally an uprising that carried Martians from the Warrens up into the Prime Dome.

Casualties numbered in the thousands and Olympus was pretty much in chaos.

But what began in Stockade VII ended in the Commissary of Mars Division headquarters with this spontaneous declaration of Martian independence.

Next week, we will pick up right here where we've left off, because this spontaneous declaration of independence by some self-appointed activists was not going to go unchallenged, nor would independence declared by anyone actually succeed without the coming mutiny of the spaceshipers.

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